


twin skeletons

by makeashadow_ao3



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/M, bonkai may 10th 2k19, i love my ship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-10
Updated: 2019-05-10
Packaged: 2020-02-29 12:31:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18778348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/makeashadow_ao3/pseuds/makeashadow_ao3
Summary: Post 8x13: Kai disappears with Elena’s casket and leaves Bonnie a message daring her to come find him. So, she calls his bluff.





	twin skeletons

**Author's Note:**

> twin skeleton's (hotel in nyc) by fall out boy gave me the vibes i needed for this

_Like the holding of hands, like the breaking of glass_  
—Hozier, “Wasteland, Baby!”

It’s a suicide mission.

That’s what Caroline tells her. As she packs a duffel, her oldest and dearest friend urges her to “think a little!” And she argues that she is thinking, she’s always thinking. About life without Enzo, about protecting the girls, about trying to imagine a time when she’ll forgive her best friend’s fiance for killing Enzo, about finding a way to break the curse on her and Elena.

She’s always thinking about that last one. Maybe doing this, going after _him_ will help her check at least one of those things off her list.

They both turn to the vanity mirror beside her bed. Scrawled in red is a message:

_COME AND FIND ME, BONSTER._

It’s too little, too late to wonder how her life might’ve gone if she’d listened to her instincts. The dreams and alarm bells and goosebumps. Her sixth sense she tossed aside for magic and how powerful it made her feel. Maybe if she’d fostered her clairvoyance like her Grams had tried...

Well, the thought crosses her mind as she presses her palm to the glass and dried blood.

She gets flashes. A knife to a palm and pooling blood. Him touching _only_ her belongings around the room. A mahogany coffin. Images of brutal torture and blood curdling screams. A white two story house.

Pulling her hand back from the cold surface, she winces and her stomach drops. The visions remind her of her experience with the Phoenix Stone. She doesn’t care for the irony.

“What’d you see?” her friend’s curious albeit cautious voice asks.

“I know where he is.”

—

It’s like walking through a long buried memory.

The lawn is overgrown, the mildewed white siding in need of a thorough power-washing, and there’s the faint sickly bitter scent of rotting lemons as she passes a fruit tree with leaves and branches swaddled in webs.

Up the steps and across the porch, she lingers at the door with her knuckles raised to knock. She could walk away right now. Leave Elena’s fate in the hands of a madman. Do like Abby did and live the rest of her years in peace far away from the drama and death that comes with being in Mystic Falls. Travel and see the world for herself, visit Ghana or Nigeria or maybe Mozambique.

Her fist tightens. Caroline’s right. This is suicide. She doesn’t have magic and from what Damon said she’s about to go against a jilted heretic who’s as morally corrupt as ever. Though, coming from the Salvatore vampire that’s the pot calling the kettle crazy.

It’s certainly a trap.

She rings the doorbell instead. Apprehensiveness turns to annoyance the longer she waits. She _knows_ he’s in there. When there are no sounds on the other side of the door, she huffs and then knocks. He’s more than likely testing her to see how determined she is to get to him. He’s already lured her all the way out to Portland, a place she vowed never to return to after her last visit.

Her knocks go unanswered, so her hand goes to the doorknob. _Last chance to walk away,_ her gut tells her and if she were better at this whole _psychic_ thing she’d turn and hightail it out of here. But she came all this way and Bonnie is not her mother.

The knob twists easily and the door swings open as if she’s been expected. The old house has a thick savory scent wafting through the air. Coupled with the humid June heat, though, it’s nauseating. The central air keeps the house at a comfortably cool temperature, but still she gets goosebumps.

He’s so close…

He’s in the kitchen, exactly where she expects to find him. She also expects to find Elena’s coffin. Instead, there is what was a feast spread across the dinner table. A turkey picked down to its bones and marrow. Crumbs of yellow cornbread. A saucer of red juice, cranberry sauce. A casserole dish with cheese and macaroni noodles dried from sitting out in the open air. The green beans and mashed potatoes are the only dishes left over. It’s the Thanksgiving meal they never had in the prison world.

Leaning against the kitchen sink, he tears into a turkey sandwich and regards her with an expressionless gaze. “Took you long enough.”

The fact that he looks so much like himself steals her breath. Not the lean, runner’s body he had back in ‘94, but the one who met her in the dim hallway of the rave. Muscles packed on under his overcoat and scruff along his jaw. She never gave much space in her mind to wonder how he’d gotten on while she was still trapped, but he aged several years in a handful of months.

He wears it too well.

She clears her throat. “Where’s Elena?”

His shoulder rises up in a dismissive manner. “Tossed her over to Cade. I had no real use for her.”

Cade’s in Mystic Falls. She came all this way and he doesn’t even have her.

“So, what’s the haps, Bon? It’s been a while.”

If she had her magic, she’d set him on fire with the glare she levels against him. “You baited me _here_...and you don’t even have her?”

“You had to have seen that coming, right? I mean, how would I have gotten through airport security with her? She’s basically a corpse. Ech. Though,” he muses, biting off a bit of his sandwich’s crust, “I suppose I could’ve used an animation spell. Gone all Weekend At Bernie’s with poor Eleanor.”

Her instincts tell her to get out now, while she still can. There’s nothing here for her. _Run_.

She steps into the room.

Instead of approaching him, she nears the table. It mirrors the one from the prison world. From what she can tell, much of the house is the same. A museum to what took place two decades before. Bonnie dips her finger in the cold mash potatoes and pops it into her mouth. She allows herself an approving hum. With all his imperfections, at least he isn’t scared of a little seasoning.

“This is a lot of food for just one person.”

“Well, you took a while and I got hungry.”

Avoiding his watchful gaze, she nods. “You did just break out of hell. Do they feed you there? Is it, like, bad middle school cafeteria food?”

“No. They don’t,” he grits in a clipped tone. “All you have is your hunger.”

“That sucks.” She rounds the table, purposefully keeping her distance and so far he seems to be respecting her apprehension. “For you, especially. Your appetite is...well, _you_ know.”

“Ravenous? Gluttonous?”

“Insatiable.”

He sucks his teeth. “Damon tells me you don’t have magic.”

She lifts her eyes to meet his and raises an eyebrow in an expression that can only be interpreted as _and what_? “What else did Damon say?”

“That his baby brother ripped your vampire boyfriend’s heart out of his chest.”

The comment is a suckerpunch in the gut, and she presumes he meant it to be. She glares out the window as she tries to stamp down the rush of emotions he triggered, the grief she’s been trying to keep a lid on. She’s hardly had a chance to _grieve_. Abby burned his body without giving Bonnie a real chance to say goodbye. Caroline’s still expecting her to make it back to Mystic Falls in time for the wedding and doesn’t quite see how difficult that might be for the former witch.

“Wouldn’t be the first time something dear to me has been ripped away.” Enzo, her magic, and Elena are just the latest on a long list of losses.

He finishes off his sandwich and sucks the mustard off his thumb. “You should stick around for a while.” Then, he strides out of the kitchen without looking back. His heavy footsteps climb the stairs and pound overhead.

She frowns. He just walked away like that? Deciding against waiting around to see what he’ll do next, she rushes out of the kitchen and down the hallway to the front door. It swings enticingly open in the breeze and she books it—only to slam into an invisible barrier. “No, no no no no no,” she mutters to herself, slapping her palms on the magic keeping her in this godforsaken house.

This is exactly the kind of thing her intuition was warning her about, and like always her tenacity or stubbornness—pick one—ignored it.

He sucks his teeth, and she whirls around to find him seated on the staircase with his elbows resting on his knees. Adrenaline mixed with resignation coursing through her, she rests her back against the barrier.

“I know I led you out here under the notion that I had Elena, but in my defense...the devil made me do it.”

—

Aside from Kai’s room, which she’s told herself is strictly off limits, every bedroom in the house belongs to someone who is now dead and buried. The bright side is she gets her pick of the litter, so she goes with Liv’s room. It’s less of a mausoleum. Liv’s autographed Warped Tour posters are a little more familiar than Jo’s faded posters of Tiffany and The Cranberries.

Once she realized she was stuck, he gave her a wide berth. Cooked them a scant dinner of red beans and rice that she did not eat and let her choose a room for her extended stay. Length? _As yet to be determined_. He exudes a coolness that’s contrary to how Damon described him behaving, contrary to how she _felt_ him when he first escaped hell. When she excuses herself from the dinner table, he doesn’t argue or follow her.

Truth be told, she finds it a little anticlimactic.

She shrugs off her jacket, pockets laden with her last resort, and hangs it over the back of a wooden desk chair. The desk is covered in dust save for a rectangular spot in the middle where it looks like a laptop sat until very recently. She digs her cell phone out of her back pocket and checks for bars only to read _No Service_. She’s pretty sure he can’t magically block her signal, but he has been waiting for her. It’s no tough feat to get a reception jammer from some online electronics store.

Falling on the bed, her face into a pillow, she thinks to scream her vocal cords raw. She thinks to cry until she’s dehydrated. She thinks to sleep. The first two options suck because he’s a heretic so his vampiric hearing would know and she refuses to give him the satisfaction, but the latter… She looks up at the closed bedroom door and notices a hole in the knob where a lock might’ve been.

Well, this is one vacuum that blows.

A tickle awakens her, skin prickling before her consciousness can detect a threat. He faces her, sits straddling the back of the desk chair while his fingers dig in her jacket pockets. Her stomach clenches as a rush of adrenaline urges off the last bit of sleep. He turns over the gems, two pieces of jade. They’re small enough to appear as harmless pebbles, but this is Kai.

“This is interesting.” He marvels at the stones pale in the moonlight, turns them over in his palm. “Quit the faking. I can hear your blood racing. Actually, I can feel it. It’s like a vibration in the air. Your heart beating and your blood pumping. Anyway, I know you’re awake.”

She sits up against the pillows and metal headboard, crosses her legs and arms, and pouts. “Fine. It’s not like I didn’t have a twelve hour travel day just to get here.”

Squinting, he pinches a stone between his thumb and finger and holds it up before rolling them both in his grasp like dice. His palm then glows red and his eyebrows shoot up. “Now, I’ve siphoned a lot of different magic, but this tastes a lot like Gemini magic to me, Bon.”

Her lips stay clamped shut, so he goes rummaging through the other pockets and talking idly. “I wonder why a witch who don’t have her magic would bring along spelled gemstones if she can’t even practice.” He gets his hand around something, her hail mary, and meets her watchful eyes. “What have we here?”

From the folds of her jacket he pulls out a hunk of silver and copper and frosted glass. They both stare at it, Kai marveling at the intricacies in its design, its divets and gears, and Bonnie wondering what he’ll do with it.

She never understood the mechanics of vampirism. Do they need to breath, sleep, eat people food to survive? She never sussed out the finer points and Kai’s a heretic, so who knows what laws of physics and metaphysics he does or doesn’t abide. But it looks to her that he’s breathing normally, even. No black veins signaling anger or hunger. He toys with the ascendant like it’s a yo-yo. A relic but somehow modernized for contemporary use.

Then he crushes the metal and glass in his fist. The sharp points don’t bite into his flesh like it would if he were simply a mortal witch and that bothers her. Not the destruction of the device, but how destructible he once was. It’s less fun for her this way.

“So, what? You were going to come here, convince me to break the linking spell, and then seal me away in yet another prison world? Haven’t we been through that ol’ song and dance?”

He tosses the crumpled ball her way and she deftly catches it. He’s unnaturally swift as he rises out of the chair and moves to the door, and before she can respond the astrolabe in her grasp goes up in flames.

He doesn’t stay and watch. Otherwise he’d see how she flings the burning object away from her with blackened palms, how it singes the comforter and bed sheets, how it sets the entire mattress on fire. Nor does he see how Bonnie frantically waves her hands, effectively dousing the fire.

Unsure of how she conjured the power, she stares at her palms for a long moment. She didn’t even think to do it, it just happened. In truth, had the option crossed her mind she may have considered letting the flames eat her up. But even now after all she’s lost and how hard she’s had to fight…

The room door is closed just as it was when she first nodded off to sleep, and her surprise resurgence of magic gives her an idea.

**Author's Note:**

> there is a second part...which will come at some point. :|


End file.
